He enjoyed the hearty co-operation of the village pastors, all of whom preached sermons to young men and to parents; but his principal practical assistance came, quite unexpectedly, from old Bunley. Bunley had not yet succeeded in finding anything to do, and, as he had on his hands all of his time which was not needed at the family woodpile, he went around talking to the boys. Bunley had been, according to the Barton classification, a “boy” himself; he had drunk in a not remote day with any boy who invited him; he knew more jolly songs than any other half dozen inebriates in the village, and was simply oppressed with the load of good (bad) stories which he never tired of telling; he had been always ready to play cards with any boy, and had come to be regarded, among the youngsters, as “the best fellow in the village.” Now that he had reformed, his success in reforming boys was simply remarkable--so much so that Parson Wedgewell began to tremble over the thought that Bunley, by the present results of the experience of his sinful days, might demonstrate, beyond the hope of refutation, the dreadful proposition that it was better that a man should be a sinner in his youth, so as to know how to be a saint when he became old. This idea Parson Wedgewell laid, with much trepidation, before the Reverend Timotheus Brown, and the two old saints and new friends had a delightfully doleful time on their knees over it, until there occurred to the Reverend Timotheus Brown a principle which he proceeded to formulate as follows: The greater the capacity of a misguided faculty for evil, the greater the good the same faculty may accomplish when in its normal condition. To be sure, the discovery was not original with him; the same statement had been made by peripatetic phrenologists at Barton; indeed, it was visible, to one who could read rather than merely repeat words, in every chapter of the Bible so dear to this good old man; but the illusion under which Parson Brown was allowed to labor worked powerfully for his own good and for that of the community, for from that time forth both he and Parson Wedgewell displayed their greatest earnestness in work with cases apparently the most hopeless. These they found among “the boys,” and harder work no reformer ever laid out for himself. The ingenuity, the persistence, the determined brutality of some of the boys, the logical acuteness displayed in varied fits of deception, only stimulated the old man to greater industry, and slowly, after hard work, often after work that seemed more like hard fighting, but yet surely, Parson Brown reformed one after another of several hard cases. The villagers, most of whom considered that their whole duty consisted in critical observation, applauded handsomely, and Bunley was astonished, and felt considerably mortified at the marked success of his new rival, while Parson Wedgewell found it necessary to pray earnestly that unchristian jealousy might be banished from his own mind.